Adherents.com: Religious Groups in Literature

34,420 citations from literature (mostly science fiction and fantasy) referring to real churches, religious groups, tribes, etc. [This database is for literary research only. It is not intended as a source of information about religion.]

[The title of the story is actually not any written characters, but a black spot. The entire story is about a black spot that grows until it takes over the pages of the story. Very odd. The author is a cartoonist.] Afterword by author: "...Harlan Ellison has asked me to expand this Afterword three times, now... The first time I tried to palm him off with a brief, Zennish comment, witty yet profound. It went right over his head. "

Zen

USA

1978

King, Stephen. The Stand. Garden City, NY: Doubleday (1978); pg. 426.

"'There used to be a book my mom had, she got it from her grandmother or something. In His Steps, that was the name of it. And there were all these little stories about guys with horrible problems. Ethical problems, most of them. And the guy who wrote the book said that to solve the problems, all you had to do was ask, 'What would Jesus do?' It always cleared the trouble right up. You know what I think? It's a Zen question, not really a question at all but a way to clear your mind, like saying Om and looking at the tip of your nose.' "

Pg. 227: "'I even joined a monastery for a while. A Zen monastery.' He smiled at the look of astonishment on the priest's face. 'But I was never one of the better students...' "; Pg. 228: "'Sometimes, Captain, I despair of my soul. Sometimes I fear I am as poor a priest as you claim to have been a student of Zen.' "

"The noble ideal, caritas, passes from the world. If we kill to prevent this, though, we betray it. It gets Zen-like here: Do nothing and the destroyer moves. Do something and you destroy it yourself. Yet you are charge to preserve it. How? The answer is supposed to be that it is a divine law and will out anyhow. I crack the koan simultaneously with an act of giving up on it. Then I am granted insight into its meaning. Or, in Christian terms, my will is empowered upon an especially trying occasion and I am granted an extraordinary measure of grace. "

"The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women'sLib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fire. " [Bradbury's first reference here, to 'Baptist / Unitarian' describes himself: He was raised as a Baptist and later become a Unitarian. The next reference: Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist is also apparently to himself.]

"'...Do you know anything about Zen, doctor? This is a Zen paradox, because from a logical standpoint Mary ought to have been the final straw that utterly destroyed Gino. It makes you rethink the entire role of adversity in human life...' "

"Outside was a garden of sand and stones so perfectly smooth and subtly symmetrical that no monk in a Zen monastary could have improved it. "

Zen

world

-13212 B.C.E.

Anderson, Poul. The Shield of Time. New York: Tor (1990); pg. 119.

[Some of these characters are time travellers.] Pg. 117: "13,212 B.C. "; pg. 119: "She took several deep breaths, consciously relaxed herself muscle by muscle, and though about a certain koan. Though she wasn't into Zen or anything like that, some of the tricks were helpful. "

"Ed Goldwasser got religion. Zen-Buddhism is pretty orthodox these days, yet somehow he found it suited him. But he didn't forget what had happened back out in space. His book, The Cosmic Mind, came out last month, and it's a good summation of Ted's ideas, with a minimum of spiritual overtones. "

"'...But it's still a renunciatory technique to achieve a predetermined trancelike state, which the Zen people call an isness, a very pure narcissism, Freud's oceanic feeling. What dignifies the yogic practice is that the belief system itself not truly religious. There is no Buddhist god per se. It is the self, the individual Mind, that contains immortality and ultimate truth--'

'What the hell's not metaphysical about that?' shouted Emily... 'You've simply replaced God with the Original Self.' " [More.]

That was a simple riddle used by Zen Masters in the training of monks, Joe remembered. You take a newborn gosling and slip it through the neck of a bottle. Month after month you keep it there and feed it, until it is a full-grown goose and can no longer be passed through the bottle's neck. The question is: Without breaking the bottle, how do you get the goose out?

Neither riddle seemed to shed much light on the other. "

Pg. 36: "'...When I figured out how you get the goose out of the bottle in the Zen riddle--you do nothing and wait for the goose to peck its way out, just like a chick pecks its way out of an egg--I realized 'Do what thou wilt' becomes 'the whole of the law' by a mathematical process...' "

"Driven to despair by his fruitless attempts to understand the universe, the sage Devadasa finally announced in exasperation:

" 'All statements that contain the word God are false.'

"Instantly, his least-favorite discipline [sic], Somasiri, replied:

" 'The sentence I am now speaking contains the word God. I fail to see, oh Noble Master, how that simple statement can be false.'

"Devadasa considered the matter for several Poyas. Then he answered, this time with apparent satisfaction:

" 'Only statements that do not contain the word God can be true.'

"After a [very brief] pause, Somasiri replied:

" 'If this statement applies to itself, oh Venerable One, it cannot be true, because it contains the word God. But if it is not true--'

"At this point, Devadasa broke his begging bowl upon Somasiri's head, and should therefore be honored as the true founder of Zen. "

From a fragment of the Culavamsa,as yet undiscovered.

Zen

world

1987

Zelazny, Roger. Sign of Chaos. New York: Arbor House (1987); pg. 3.

"Well. . . . It had all startled when I'd shaken my own hand. No. Wrong. That sounds like Zen and that's not how it was. The hand I shook emerged from the space occupied by the image of myself on the card that went away. "

Pg. 26: "The monastery nestled like a bamboo-and-rice paper pearl in a setting of verdant green hills...

'I'm here to see Fortunato,' said Tach...

The monk brightened at the sound of her name, but then a distressed murmur of Japanese began... ";

Pg. 28: "...she walked off the bridge and into the heart of the Zen garden.

Fortunato was waiting on a stone bench set artistically before a small pagoda. The gravel of the path crunched beneath her feet, but the ace continued to read, not deigning to acknowledge her arrival... " [More.]

"In my final year [of Law School] I became interested in the literature of religion--or, to be more precise, the literature of mysticism... Purely as an intellectual diversion I began to read St. John of the Cross, George Fox, the Vedas, Tao, Zen, the Kabbala, the Sufis. "

Pg. 22: "No, the aliens are ineffable and unknowable, and their caprices are no more to be questioned than the koans of a Zen master. "; Pg. 76: "While the public speculates, the uncooperative astronauts carry on their domestic routines with Zen-like imperturbability--until they die, decades later. "

Pg. 387: "A Jodo Tendai chanting group time-shares it with a free-fall yoga class. I promised myself before I left that I would not turn into one of these astronaut-mystics who find being beyond the envelope of atmosphere and gravity a religious revelation, but it would be very easy to succumb to a Zen state of disconnectedness with worldly things. Never could manage lotus, though. Something wrong with my left shin. "; [More about Zen, pg. 392, 397.]

"In some ways, net death was much more effective than its biological antecedent. Born-again manifestations were one thing, but the residue of psychic damage was permanently archived in the real collective unconscious of the world, which some Japanese Zen master had dubbed the 'Wired Akashic Records.' "

"'Don't you laugh at me, Claude. I tried to get into a monastery . . . the Cistercians, Poor Clares, Carmelites. And they took one look at my psychosocial profile and told me get lost. Counseling, they advised! Not even the Zen-Brigittines would give me a chance! But I finally discovered that there is one place where an old-fashioned mystic wouldn't by out of place. Have you ever hard of Exile?' "

"'I am a foolish, useless old man. I would not be here in the first place if I were able to rule myself through Zen . . . The nets--if they fail they fail their purpose, the fault will be my own! the dishonor!' "

"'Good grief, no. The individual hours aren't that long. I'll also celebrate the Mass and do penance and deep meditation with a little Zen...' "

Zen

world

2125

Anderson, Poul. Harvest of Stars. New York: Tor (1993); pg. 14.

"For a moment Kyra frowned. Why these mood swings? She'd been at risk before and stayed zen. " [In this passage, 'zen' is used by a non-Buddhist as an adjective for a mental state, showing that Anderson envisions the word passing into popular parlance somewhat disassociated from any sectarian sense. The year is estimated.]

"'...I will not do what I can do, but I will make them know what I can do. In your mind's memory-section there is a Zen story about the greatest swordsman in Japan. Two men challenge him.. They agree to row out to a small island and fight there. The greatest swordsman in Japan, being a student of Zen, sees to it that he is last to leave the boat. The moment the others have leaped out onto the shore of the island he pushes off, rows away, leaving them and their swords there. Thus he proves his claim for what it is: indeed he is the finest swordsman in Japan. Do you see the application to my situation? I can outfight your establishment, but I will do so by not-fighting . . . if you follow my thought. It will be in fact my refusal to fight--yet showing my strength--which will frighten them the most, because they cannot imagine such power held but not used...' "

"One book was the Zen monk Dogen's teachings; the other was a copy of the ancient samurai Musashi's Five Rings, a book of strategy. Nobu consulted both often, consistently amazed at how apt the advice was after so many centuries. "

Pg. 245: "She hadn't been speaking ERA [Feminism/Equal Rights Amendment] very long. The last time she called, she had been speaking est and the time before that California. "; Pg. 246: "...but at the time Charlotte had been speaking Zen. She had insisted on bonsais and a curving bridge over the irrigation ditch. Before the landscaping was finished, she had switched to an anti-Watt dialect that had put an end to the marriage and sent Sally flying off east to school. " [Zen is grouped here with other short-lived popular liberal fads.]

"They were not like the priests of the Black brotherhood, but Zen monks of the order of Fuke-shu. They wore dark blue kimonos tied with a red sash, and high-blocked geta sandals, and were never without their hardwood shakuhachi flutes, which they could wield with the defensive skill of a sword master attacked; but their strangest piece of apparel was the tengai, the woven reed basket that covered the head and protected the monk from wordly identification. Their efforts had brought him light and food and then a short period each day in the high-walled yard to exercise alone. Lastly the rule of silence had been withdrawn and he had been permitted to associate together with the others. "

"'Think. Legally, logically, nothing that has happened will forbit it. But humans are not driven by logic. The undertaking was always more an ideal, a wish for a culture to survive or grow, than a business venture, no? Not unlike the state of Israel or the movement for a viable space program on twentieth-century Earth...' "

Pg. 45: "'A freelance combat team from Zion made the insertion. Rongor battle robots, controlled from orbit. No chance the sybil could infect a sentient form. The expedition was under the guise of an archaeological mapping expedition. If the expedition had been compromised, the trail would have led back to Zion fundamentalists, seeking new weapons.' ";

Pg. 189: "'A Zionist?' the emperor said.

'A hired gun,' Ball said.

'Don't mouth off,' the gunman said. " [Many refs. in novel to the religious people from the planet Zion.]

"'I had never been a Zionist--indeed, our family had never acknowledged the existence of Palestine as a possible Jewish state--but when I stepped off that overcrowded Turkish freighter in June of 1946 and set foot on what would someday be Israel, a heavy yoke seemed to be lifted from my shoulders and for the first time since eight September, 1939, I was able to breathe freely. I confess that I fell to my knees and shed tears that day.' " [More.]

"Once inside [Joker's Quarter] I saw no nats at all, only jokers--jokers of all races and religions, all living in relative peace. Once they might have been Muslims or Jews or Christians, zealots or Zionists or followers of the Nur, but after their hand had been dealt, they were only jokers. "

Zionism

Jordan

1978

Tucker, Wilson. The Year of the Quiet Sun. New York: Ace (1970); pg. 28.

"'I believe the Jordanian government contributed a certain amount of information on the incident, sir...'

"The colony was not only efficient and prosperous, it was also able to provide decent jobs for all its inhabitants. With the exception of the Israeli settlement to the north, the union colony was the most viable on the planet. And the Israeli settlement had the advantage of possessing die-hard Zionist shock units, encamped on the desert proper, engaged in reclamation projects of all sorts... Alone, New Israel had reclaimed a third of all the desert land now under cultivation. It was, in fact, the only settlement on Mars which exported its produce back to Earth in any quantity. " [Other refs. to the New Israel colony throughout novel, but no other refs to 'Zionism' by name.]

Zionism

New York

1979

Ing, Dean. Soft Targets. New York: Tor (1996; c. 1979); pg. 40.

"'Greetings from Fat'ah,' the hood nodded slightly, 'to all of the victims of Jewish oppression wherever they may be.' Everett, glaring at the screen, found himself clenching and spreading his big hands, surprised at his own first reaction. It was the same cold sick breathlessness he felt whenever he saw a small animal beneath the wheels of a truck. Then the blood began to sing in Everett's veins as Hakim Arif, gesturing with languid ease, proceeded to promise aid to the foes of the Israeli conspiracy. 'All over the world, victims of Zionism are rising to demonstrate a single will. The will to live in a free Quebec, a free South Molucca, a free Ireland,' he paused expertly... '--a free Palestine.' The hood jerked up. 'The Jew is the very symbol of oppression. he wants only his own land--and all of the land adjoining it. Ah, and the Coming of his Messiah, always the Coming.' " [More. Some other refs., e.g. pg. 83.]

"I said, Hell, ain't you sticking up for your own people? What people? he asks. I'm a financial analyst from Long Island, or I will be if I ever finish at NYU. Just don't want to hear any more Zionist [nonsense]. "

"Jacob looked up as they parted, saw the blue haze of Earth just off to port, the glow of Mars not far beyond. The asteroid was just beginning to turn its solars portside, the windows moving away from the Sun.

He said, 'The soil is lousy here. You must be a Zionist to do so well, Dr. Rosen.' " [Other refs., not in DB.]

"The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women'sLib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fire. "

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